Life in OUR America, Volume 2, The Livyjr Files Options

[Livyjr]

We lucked out because, as the city expanded, they kept building sewers, dumping raw sewage into the ocean of course.

But all the lines liked up to the El Segundo pipeline, near Hyperion, so it was ultimately possible to build a waste treatment facility there.

Which they did.

Well, jeffmoskin, you have just put the whole field, or concept, of "city planning" back into its proper context, which is that it is likely a farce, all too much of the time, a great big bill of goods that people suck up like pablum, and then they go back home, or never leave there in the first place, to see what impacts might going to befall them, from the next "best thing for the community" that some intinerant drummer or land developer from somewhere else has just brought to your town for consideration!

"Well, it's true I'm not from here, and it's also true that I don't know nothing about here, but my project, well, it is just the best kind of thing, and since I only build upscale, well, I only deal with the better sort, you know ...."

Ah, well, no, I don't really know!

Why don't you edify me?

And believe it or not, we are taught about Los Angeles as an example of city planning, back here, by all these experts!

Just goes to show you ....

[Livyjr]

"Iraq links London attacks to insurgency" 
 
By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press
Last updated: 11:06 a.m., Friday, July 8, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Islamic extremists have been using Iraq as a planning center for attacks around the world since losing Afghanistan as their base in 2001, the government's chief spokesman said Friday.

"Taliban claims to kill ‘captured’ American - Groups offers no proof SEAL is held hostage; U.S. search persists"

Updated: 4:51 a.m. ET July 9, 2005

KABUL, Afghanistan - Taliban guerrillas said on Saturday they had killed a missing American commando they claimed to have captured in eastern Afghanistan last month.

The U.S. military said it had no information to support the claim.

“We killed him at 11 o’clock today; we killed him using a knife and chopped off his head,” Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said from an undisclosed location.

He said that the body had been dumped on a mountain in the eastern province of Kunar.

The U.S. military has said it has no information to suggest the Navy SEAL commando, part of a four-man team that went missing during a clash with militants in mountainous Kunar on June 28, has been captured.

Asked about the Taliban claim that the man had been killed, U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry O’Hara said he had no information to support it, but the military was looking into the report.

“We are still conducting a search hoping our missing service member is alive as we have no proof telling us otherwise,” he said.

The U.S. military has said two of the missing commandos were found dead on Monday, having been “killed in action”, while another had been rescued and one was missing.

A U.S. helicopter sent to aid the team was shot down the same day the team went missing during a battle with insurgents, killing all 16 troops aboard, the heaviest losses for U.S. forces in a single combat operation since they overthrew the Taliban in late 2001.

Unreliable messenger

Hakimi’s information has often proven unreliable in the past, but he has appeared well informed about events surrounding the helicopter crash.

He said the body of the commando had been left on the top of a mountain in Kunar province’s Shegal district.

“He is wearing red clothes,” he said.

“We got the information we wanted from him during the interrogation.”

Hakimi had said earlier on Saturday that the man the guerrillas claimed to be holding was a commando officer and would be killed in two or three days following his interrogation.

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency also quoted a guerrilla commander in Kunar, Mohammad Ismail, as saying that the commando had been killed.

It quoted Hakimi as saying the killing followed a decision by the Taliban’s council of religious leaders.

Hundreds of U.S. soldiers, backed by Afghan troops and helicopters, have been searching for the missing commando in Kunar for the past 12 days.

Terrain, weather hampers search

Navy SEALs are trained to operate behind enemy lines and the rescued commando evaded militants for five days.

The U.S. military has said the search, involving more than 300 U.S. troops backed by aircraft and Afghan forces, has been hampered by rugged, wooded terrain and cloudy weather.

The Taliban have never before captured, or claimed to have captured, a U.S. soldier.

U.S. President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, declared on Tuesday it was a top priority to find the missing man.

U.S. media have said the loss of eight Navy Seals aboard the helicopter and the two on the ground, were the heaviest ever losses in a combat operation for the 2,400-strong elite force.

[Livyjr]

And in Iraq, where major combat operations by OUR military are long since over, according to COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF George W. Bush, it looks like we have yet another major combat operation, on-going, but since George W. Bush is likely still focused on how and why he ran that Scottish cop down at Gleneagles, he likely does not know what is going on in Iraq, as if he ever did ....

"U.S. Launches Operation Scimitar in Iraq"

By FRANK GRIFFITHS, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 23 minutes ago

BAGHDAD, Iraq - About 600 U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers have launched a fourth counterinsurgency operation in less than a month in a volatile western province in Iraq, this time near Fallujah, the military said Saturday.

Operation Scimitar started Thursday with targeted raids in the village of Zaidan, 20 miles southeast of Fallujah.

So far, 22 suspected insurgents had been detained.

Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, was a major insurgent bastion until U.S. forces overran the city in November.

The military said it did not announce the offensive earlier because commanders did not want to tip off insurgents that a major operation had begun.

The campaign — named after a curved Asian sword — includes 500 Marines from the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, Regimental Combat Team-8, stationed in Okinawa, Japan, the military said.

About 100 Iraqi soldiers were supporting the operation, which is designed to disrupt insurgent activity in the Anbar province.

The latest counterinsurgency offensive in the province came on the heels of Operations Spear, Dagger and Sword.

There are a number of insurgent strongholds in Anbar, which stretches from Baghdad to the Syrian border.

The heaviest fighting occurred during Operation Spear in mid-June in the town of Karabilah near the porous Syrian border, which intelligence officials believe is the main gateway for foreign fighters entering Iraq.

The military said it killed about 50 insurgents in airstrikes, tank shelling and gunbattles during Operation Spear.

Sections of Karabilah were left in rubble.

Elsewhere Saturday, gunmen using three cars killed police Capt. Saad Mihsin Abdul Sadah in Amiriyah, 25 miles west of Baghdad.

He was on his way to work at the Interior Ministry, police said.

The insurgency has frequently targeted Iraq's security forces, but started focusing on attacking foreign diplomats in recent days as part of a new trend apparently aimed at isolating the country from the Arab world.

A roadside bomb hit an American convoy in the central city of Samarra, damaging one Humvee, police Capt. Laith Mohammed said.

There no immediate reports of casualties.

A separate mortar attack in downtown Samarra wounded three women, he said.

At the G-8 summit in Scotland, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi said his government would begin withdrawing about 300 troops from Iraq in September — subject to security conditions at the time.

The moves came as violent incidents in the Iraqi capital are declining since Iraq's U.S.-backed forces launched an operation against insurgents in the city six weeks ago.

The commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr., said car bombings had dropped from 14 to 21 a week in May to about seven or eight a week now.

But he said it was "very difficult to know" whether the insurgency has been broken.

Iraqi officials have become concerned about a possible exodus of diplomats from Baghdad after a Web site claim Thursday by al-Qaida in Iraq that it had killed Egyptian envoy Ihab al-Sherif, who was seized by up to eight gunmen on a street in western Baghdad last weekend.

Egyptian and Iraqi officials said Egypt would temporarily close its mission in Iraq and recall its staff — although al-Sherif's body has not been found and the Web statement contained no photographic evidence of his death.

Pakistan's Ambassador Mohammed Younis Khan left the country Wednesday after his convoy was fired on in a kidnap attempt.

Bahrain's top envoy, Hassan Malallah al-Ansari, was expected to leave soon after he was slightly wounded in a separate attempt.

In its Web statement, the country's most feared terror group said it wanted to seize "as many ambassadors as we can" to punish governments that support Iraq's Shiite-dominated government.

Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq until fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein was ousted in 2003, boycotted January elections and now make up the core of an insurgency that has killed more than 1,475 people since the Shiite- and Kurdish-led government took office on April 28.

[Livyjr]

"U.S. Launches Operation Scimitar in Iraq"

By FRANK GRIFFITHS, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - About 600 U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers have launched a fourth counterinsurgency operation in less than a month in a volatile western province in Iraq, this time near Fallujah, the military said Saturday.

Operation Scimitar started Thursday with targeted raids in the village of Zaidan, 20 miles southeast of Fallujah.

And while George W. Bush and his version of America launch yet another major combat operation against the beleaguered peoples of Iraq, nature is launching a combat operation of its own against America .....

"Million urged to leave U.S. coast ahead of Dennis"

By Frances Kerry

59 minutes ago

MIAMI (Reuters) - Authorities urged more than a million people to evacuate as Hurricane Dennis closed in on low-lying coastal areas of northwestern Florida, Alabama and Mississippi on Saturday after killing at least 32 people in Cuba and Haiti.

The storm was on a northwest track that could take it to landfall on Sunday between Florida's northwestern panhandle and Mississippi -- an area still recovering from a battering by Hurricane Ivan in September.

Early on Saturday Dennis had pounded Cuba, shattering houses, downing power lines and littering streets with debris before brushing past the southern tip of Florida.

Even though southern Florida did not get Dennis' full force, some 140,000 homes and businesses were without power in the state at about noon, state officials said.

Most outages were in the Florida Keys and other parts of southern Florida, including the Miami area, hit by stormy weather from the hurricane's outer bands.

Dennis weakened as it crossed Cuba on Friday from a ferocious 150 mph (240 kph) hurricane to a 90-mph (144-kph) storm but immediately regained some of its lost strength when it hit open water and skirted Key West, the popular tourist island at the end of the Florida Keys chain.

The hurricane was pushing top sustained winds of about 100 mph (160 kph) and forecasters said it could strengthen in the coming hours as it passed over the warm waters of the Gulf.

At 3 p.m. (1900 GMT) the center of Dennis was located about 295 miles south of Apalachicola, Florida, and was moving northwestward at 14 mph (23 kph).

"This is a very dangerous storm," Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said, urging people to heed evacuation orders or advice out to some 700,00 people in the state.

Authorities in Alabama and Mississippi called for more than 500,000 people to leave their homes in vulnerable areas.

CUBA MOPS UP

In Cuba, workers cleared debris, fallen trees, lampposts and electrical lines from streets in urban areas pounded by the storm.

Much of the country of 11 million people was still without power, including Havana, the capital, and Cienfuegos, the city on the south-central coast hardest hit by Dennis.

"It felt as if the world was coming to an end," said Maria Helena, a housewife in Cienfuegos.

"The hurricane sounded like helicopters and planes flying over my home."

Roaring winds with gusts of up to 100 mph (165 kph) and driving rain pounded blacked-out Havana all night.

Authorities cut off power to avoid accidents from fallen cables.

Ten people were killed in Cuba on Thursday night when the storm hit the southeastern corner of the island, most of them in collapsed houses in two coastal towns in Granma province.

Officials said 15,400 of the adjacent towns' 20,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

Television images showed rows of clapboard houses flattened by the storm.

In southern Haiti, 15 people died when a swollen river tore away a bridge.

The overall death toll in Haiti reached 22, officials said.

Authorities had ordered people out of the lower half of the 100-mile Florida Keys but the island chain appeared to escape the full brunt of the storm.

"We're very fortunate that we didn't get the bulk of the storm," Key West Mayor Jimmy Weekley told Miami's WFOR television.

"We haven't had a lot of damage."

Dennis is a threat to key oil and natural gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico, where a quarter of U.S. production comes from.

Energy companies have pulled hundreds of workers off oil rigs and shut down some crude and natural gas production.

Ivan, which was one of four hurricanes that hit Florida in a six-week period last year, caused extensive damage to Gulf pipelines and rigs.

Dennis could hit on Sunday in the area near the Florida-Alabama border that was hammered by Ivan.

Florida officials said some 40,000 people across the state had homes that still had not been repaired from last year's hurricanes.

"They are hurting," said Bush, referring to residents of the area.

"There is a legitimate feeling 'why me, why us, what did we do wrong?"'

(Additional reporting by Anthony Boadle in Havana, Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince, Cathy Donelson in Mobile, Jennifer Portman in Tallahassee and Jim Loney in Miami)

end quotes

"There is a legitimate feeling 'why me, why us, what did we do wrong?"'

Well, how about this, did you support George W. Bush, and his brother Jeb, when they wanted to destroy other peoples, in other countries, because they are Bush's, and so have God on their side, in their version of things?

Might you people have done that, I wonder?

Did you pray for God to destroy other people?

Did you ever consider that when God gets prayers like that, he of course hears them, and then, to be sure that the person praying is very sincere in what they are asking for, for others, of course, he gives them a dose themselves, just to give them an opportunity to fine-tune their prayer, if necessary?

Just curious .....

[Livyjr]

And while George W. Bush and his version of America launch yet another major combat operation against the beleaguered peoples of Iraq, nature is launching a combat operation of its own against America .....

"Million urged to leave U.S. coast ahead of Dennis"

By Frances Kerry

MIAMI (Reuters) - Authorities urged more than a million people to evacuate as Hurricane Dennis closed in on low-lying coastal areas of northwestern Florida, Alabama and Mississippi on Saturday after killing at least 32 people in Cuba and Haiti.

The storm was on a northwest track that could take it to landfall on Sunday between Florida's northwestern panhandle and Mississippi -- an area still recovering from a battering by Hurricane Ivan in September.

Florida officials said some 40,000 people across the state had homes that still had not been repaired from last year's hurricanes.

"They are hurting," said Bush, referring to residents of the area.

"There is a legitimate feeling 'why me, why us, what did we do wrong?"'

(Additional reporting by Anthony Boadle in Havana, Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince, Cathy Donelson in Mobile, Jennifer Portman in Tallahassee and Jim Loney in Miami)

end quotes

"There is a legitimate feeling 'why me, why us, what did we do wrong?"'

Well, how about this, did you support George W. Bush, and his brother Jeb, when they wanted to destroy other peoples, in other countries, because they are Bush's, and so have God on their side, in their version of things?

Might you people have done that, I wonder?

Did you pray for God to destroy other people?

Did you ever consider that when God gets prayers like that, he of course hears them, and then, to be sure that the person praying is very sincere in what they are asking for, for others, of course, he gives them a dose themselves, just to give them an opportunity to fine-tune their prayer, if necessary?

Just curious .....

"Four Named Storms in July Set Record"

By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer

2 hours, 54 minutes ago

Arlene, Bret, Cindy and now Dennis.

Storm hunters don't expect to be hunched over their radar screens and dispatching chase aircraft until Labor Day.

But 2005 is no normal year.

Martin Nelson, the lead forecaster at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, says this is the first time the Atlantic hurricane season had four named storms this early since record-keeping began in 1851.

The season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

The first three storms never grew beyond tropical storms that dumped rain and cut utilities from Louisiana to the Carolinas.

Dennis got its name on July 5 and two days later it had morphed into a Category 4 monster with winds reaching 150 mph.

It also is the earliest occurrence of a Category 4 hurricane in the Caribbean, and possibly the U.S., meteorologists say.

Having killed 20 people in Haiti and Cuba, now Dennis has set its sights on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Forecasters predict it will regain strength over warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the storm will hit the mainland anywhere from Florida to Louisiana on Sunday.

Researchers have several ideas why this hurricane season is beginning so ferociously, but they say one thing appears likely.

"If you get these really early big storms," says senior research meteorologist Hugh Willoughby of Florida International University in Miami, "that means it is likely to be an active season."

That's just what 65 million Americans living on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts don't want to hear.

Hurricanes are among nature's most fearsome events.

A storm can span 400 miles and tower 10 miles high.

Inhaling energy from warm seawater, it might churn for a week or more across 3,000 miles before it collapses.

Some people still are rebuilding from last year when five hurricanes and four tropical storms pounded the Atlantic and Caribbean basins in August and September.

At least four of the storms caused hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damages.

Scientists called it a "once in a lifetime kind of a year."

Did they speak too soon?

Maybe.

That's because the meteorological conditions that spawned last season's destruction are persisting in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins this year, and possibly for decades to come.

Forecaster William Gray at Colorado State University has upped his 2005 Atlantic hurricane forecast three times since December, beginning with 11 named storms, then 13, then 15.

Now he is saying the number of named storms will be "significantly above" the long-term average of 9.6 named storms and 5.9 hurricanes.

At least four storms may blow up into major hurricanes like Dennis, nearly twice as many as normal.

The chance of a major hurricane making landfall somewhere on the East Coast, including the Florida peninsula, is nearly twice as high as in an average year, Gray says.

For the Gulf coast from Pensacola, Fla. to Brownsville, Texas, the risk is about one-third higher.

Gray and others base their judgments on several measurements of atmospheric and ocean conditions worldwide.

Quiet hurricane seasons coincide with El Nino conditions in the Pacific.

When Pacific water temperatures rise, it changes global wind patterns.

High in the atmosphere, wind shear knocks down storms that arise in the Atlantic, preventing many from reaching wind speeds of at least 74 mph.

But in stormy years like 2005, Atlantic sea surface temperatures are warming above 81 degrees.

Without much wind shear, humid westerly winds from Africa's bulge grow stronger.

The warmer ocean heats the air in a rising column, creating a center of moist low pressure.

Trade winds rush in toward this depression.

Combined with the planet's rotation, they spin clouds counterclockwise around this steamy core, or "eye" of the storm.

Conditions in the Gulf of Mexico can perpetuate these storms over days and hundreds of miles.

Normally, the Gulf consists of a thin layer of warm water that rides atop a foundation of cold seawater.

When storms cross into the basin, the winds churn these layers and the colder water pulls the plug on the storm's motor.

But sometimes, the large Loop Current spawns deep pockets of warm water called eddies that move east-to-west and cover up to 20 percent across the Gulf.

If a hurricane happens to pass over one of these eddies, it acts like a shot of espresso and re-caffeinates the storm.

Louisiana state climatologist Barry Keim says surface temperatures in the Gulf are at least 81 degrees, adding to the dangerous conditions.

"This is going to be a big, bad storm," Keim said of Hurricane Dennis.

"The fuel for the storm is the energy of the evaporation off the Gulf surface."

"Warmer water means more fuel to feed the system."

Experts believe the current hurricane surge is part of an obvious storm cycle.

Roughly from 1970-94, Atlantic hurricane activity in the United States was relatively mild.

But 1995-2004 is the most active 10 consecutive hurricane seasons on record, Gray says.

The cycle of heightened activity could last another 20 years or more.

The trend is believed to be a consequence of natural salinity and temperature changes in the Atlantic's deep current circulation that shift back and forth every 40-60 years.

Keim says the last year there were this many named storms early in the storm season was 1959, with the fourth named on July 7, 1959.

In 1900, there were four storms by mid-July, but only one made landfall, Willoughby said.

[Livyjr]

From New York State Penal Law:

TITLE X ORGANIZED CRIME CONTROL ACT

ARTICLE 460 ENTERPRISE CORRUPTION

S 460.00 Legislative findings.

The legislature finds and determines as follows:

Organized crime in New York state involves highly sophisticated, complex and widespread forms of criminal activity.

The diversified illegal conduct engaged in by organized crime, rooted in the illegal use of force, fraud, and corruption, constitutes a major drain upon the state's economy, costs citizens and businesses of the state billions of dollars each year, and threatens the peace, security and general welfare of the people of the state.

Organized crime continues to expand its corrosive influence in the state through illegal enterprises engaged in such criminal endeavors as the theft and fencing of property, the importation and distribution of narcotics and other dangerous drugs, arson for profit, hijacking, labor racketeering, loansharking, extortion and bribery, the illegal disposal of hazardous wastes, syndicated gambling, trafficking in stolen securities, insurance and investment frauds, and other forms of economic and social exploitation.

The money and power derived by organized crime through its illegal enterprises and endeavors is increasingly being used to infiltrate and corrupt businesses, unions and other legitimate enterprises and to corrupt our democratic processes.

The above language from the Penal Law of the State of New York, of course, was from back in 1986, or so, back in the days when some pretext was still being made in New York State about caring that the money and power derived by organized crime through its illegal enterprises and endeavors was increasingly being used to infiltrate and corrupt businesses, unions and other legitimate enterprises and to corrupt our democratic processes in the State of New York, and likely, in OUR America, as well, but specifically, the State of New York, which has been subsequently judged to be one of the ten most corrupt states in the United States, which honor New York State has worked hard to achieve, in large part by simply doing away with OUR democratic processes, which were corrupted anyway, so why bother pretending anymore that we still had them?

Truth be told, by 1986, some enterprising young men in positions of power in New York State realized what an untapped potential all this "rackets" money represented, to them, if they could but find a way to exploit that opportunity, and so, a marriage of convenience was formed ....

People with lots of illegal money need places to launder that money, such a strip malls and subdivisions, and so ....

Here, in this local newspaper article which follows, from George Pataki's CAPITOL of Albany, New York, is where New York State is today with respect to hero worship of money, and gambling, which is now going to be the SAVIOR of New York State's "economy".

In the earliest days of this nation's history, at the time of the rebellion against English corruption, virtue was considered a thing of importance, here in OUR America, such as it was at that time!

Since then, of course, the politicians have found that virtue does not line their pockets very well, and so, we have had to give up virtue up here, as being "un-American", in that it is bad for the economy, and now "sin" is the big ticket item up here, and make no mistake about that, whatsoever!

Poker player hoping victory is in the cards - Ryan Puckey of Latham wins the chance to face the best in Las Vegas"

By DAVID FILKINS, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Saturday, July 9, 2005

Gut-check time came well after midnight for Ryan Puckey.

He stared at the monitor, down on his luck and nearly broke.

The numbers weren't lying.

Of 200 players remaining in the low-risk, high-anxiety online poker game, Puckey's chip count was 190th.

There was little left to lose.

So he did it.

He clicked "All in."

Puckey won that hand.

And the next.

And the one after that.

By night's end, the 27-year-old Latham resident had defeated 300 others in a pokerstars.com no-limit Texas hold'em satellite tournament, one of two he won on consecutive nights in May.

The prize wasn't monetary.

Rather, it was an invitation to the $60 million World Series of Poker, which began Thursday in Las Vegas.

The Internet poker provider paid Puckey's $10,000 registration fee, airfare and nine-night stay at Sin City resort Treasure Island.

In return, he has to wear the company's logo when he sits down for his opening-round game this afternoon and at any subsequent games, should he advance.

Puckey also gets to keep the shirts, hats and jacket with which he was furnished.

All on a $3 investment.

"Overwhelming," Puckey said Friday as he surveyed the tournament floor at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino.

"The playing field is bigger than a football field."

"There are over 200 tables in here."

He is one of 5,661 vying for the $7.5 million first prize.

The field is composed of high-profile players, avid gamblers and contest winners like Puckey.

He'll likely face opposition of each kind when he takes his seat for today's 11-hour marathon.

Puckey said his expectations are extremely low.

"I'm not a great player," he said.

"I just started playing hold'em last year."

"Some of these players have real experience, reading people's faces and finding out what they have."

"If I get eliminated in the first 20 minutes, I still got a paid vacation."

"There will be no complaints."

Phil Ivey, a 27-year-old winner of five "bracelets" -- the poker equivalent of a Super Bowl ring -- is listed on the betting site bodog.com as the favorite at 200-1.

Odds for Puckey, of course, weren't even listed.

That doesn't mean he should be low on optimism.

The last two World Series of Poker champions, Greg Raymer in 2004 and Chris Moneymaker in 2003, entered via satellite victories on pokerstars.com as well.

Puckey began watching poker on television a few years ago.

Casual viewing eventually turned him into a "huge fan."

He joined the site in March at the urging of poker-playing friends.

He spends an hour or two each day playing online, rarely for money.

He wouldn't have joined the tournament he ended up winning had the entry fee not been $3.

"He does it purely for fun," said Puckey's mother, Lorraine.

"He's definitely an amateur."

"That's why he doesn't expect to get very far."

Should the unthinkable happen, Puckey, a maintenance worker at Shaker High School, has a few ideas for his winnings.

"I'd retire," he said.

"You try not to think about something like that so you won't be disappointed when you lose."

"But it's impossible to keep it entirely out of your head."

"I'm a pretty relaxed person, so I'm staying calm."

"It would be great to have a pro or celebrity at my table, and even better to knock them out."

He'll have moral support once play begins.

Puckey's girlfriend, Kara Mates, is flying to Las Vegas this morning.

Her flight was paid for with the money left over from Puckey's $1,000 airfare allowance.

Mates was confident, despite the odds.

"He's an exceptional player," said Mates, 26.

"I hope he goes all the way."

"But if he doesn't, it's OK."

"We'll get to see the sights together."

"It's crazy."

"It's the chance of a lifetime."

end quotes

As George Pataki says, "ALL IT TAKES, KIDS, IS A DOLLAR AND A DREAM!"

Throw out those schoolbooks, they are for sissies!

Forget hard work, that is for fools!

"A DOLLAR AND A DREAM", and the State of New York has some candy, just for you!

Yeah, right, George!

[Livyjr]

The above language from the Penal Law of the State of New York, of course, was from back in 1986, or so, back in the days when some pretext was still being made in New York State about caring that the money and power derived by organized crime through its illegal enterprises and endeavors was increasingly being used to infiltrate and corrupt businesses, unions and other legitimate enterprises and to corrupt our democratic processes in the State of New York, and likely, in OUR America, as well, but specifically, the State of New York, which has been subsequently judged to be one of the ten most corrupt states in the United States, which honor New York State has worked hard to achieve, in large part by simply doing away with OUR democratic processes, which were corrupted anyway, so why bother pretending anymore that we still had them?

Truth be told, by 1986, some enterprising young men in positions of power in New York State realized what an untapped potential all this "rackets" money represented, to them, if they could but find a way to exploit that opportunity, and so, a marriage of convenience was formed ....

People with lots of illegal money need places to launder that money, such a strip malls and subdivisions, and so ....

As George Pataki says, "ALL IT TAKES, KIDS, IS A DOLLAR AND A DREAM!"

Throw out those schoolbooks, they are for sissies!

Forget hard work, that is for fools!

"A DOLLAR AND A DREAM", and the State of New York has some candy, just for you!

Yeah, right, George!

"Condo crazy at the heart of a boom"

By Ron Scherer, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Fri Jul 8, 4:00 AM ET

CORAL SPRINGS, FLA. - For four humid days and three sweaty nights, Michael Bergman and Karen Bolber camped outside an apartment complex that was converting to condominium ownership.

They endured thunderstorms, the threat of a hurricane, and mosquitoes from the nearby Everglades.

But it was all worth it, says Mr. Bergman, a real estate broker with RE/MAX Partners in Coral Springs.

Once the condo's sales office opened, he and Ms. Bolber, also a real estate broker, bought $3 million worth of property for clients in Connecticut, New York, and Florida.

He envisions some of those investors quickly selling their stakes and making $50,000 to $60,000.

"It was worth eight or ten mosquito bites," he says.

Lines of people waiting to buy condos for quick profits and white-hot real estate - it's all part of what some analysts are calling the biggest real estate bubble in America.

In Miami, the construction crane could become the new state bird as some 25,00 new units are punching into the skyline - with another 40,000 on the drawing board.

And with prices going up 27 to 37 percent per year in the past two years, some buildings' ownership is up to 70 percent investors.

The huge new supply of condos, combined with sharply rising prices, is causing some to break out the storm-warning flags.

"There is a four- to five- year supply of condos hitting the market in the next 2-1/2 years," says Jack McCabe of McCabe Research & Consulting in Deerfield Beach.

"While the fundamentals are strong long term - some 1,000 people a day move to Florida - there could be some adjustments due to oversupply."

Recently, Merrill Lynch & Co., in a report called "Mega Metro Bubbles," ranked Miami as the hottest housing market in the nation for the third year in a row.

Lehman Brothers housing guru Joe Abate says Miami, like California, is "frothy and speculative," with home prices rising faster than income levels.

And Peter Schiff, president of stock-brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, says "I'll probably buy a few myself - they'll be in foreclosure."

'A lot more difficult to afford housing'

For economists, one of the red flags in Miami, as in other white-hot markets, is the home-price-to-income ratio.

The higher the ratio, the more the buyer has to stretch to make payments.

Since 2001, home prices in Miami are up 85 percent, nearly double the national average, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

At the same time, per capita income growth has averaged below 3 percent.

"It's getting a lot more difficult to afford housing," says Claudia Lokody, a Merrill Lynch economist who worked on the firm's report.

Of course, some Floridians shrug off the negative talk.

"It's all people who don't live here," says Mr. Bergman.

Indeed, some say the booming real estate market in Miami is merely reflecting demographic changes.

Of the 1,000 people per day who move to Florida, some 28 percent move to the southern part of the state.

Many of those - some 36 percent - are foreign-born, attracted to the tropical city with its mix of Latino culture and "Miami Vice" sex appeal.

Many want their children educated in the US - or at least in a place denominated in US dollars.

At the same time, Miami has become a gateway to Latin American commerce, something that is sure to expand, especially with the city a candidate to host the secretariat of the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement.

"It would cause another boost to the urban core," says Michael Cannon, managing director of Integra Realty Resources in Miami.

"It would be like a mini-UN."

The drive for irresistible marketing

Baby boomers, hoping to escape northern winters, are buying second homes in the Sunshine State.

"The big story is the return of the American buyer," says Ron Shuffield, president of Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell Inc. realtors, who are marketing the Metropolitan, a huge residential and commercial complex in downtown Miami.

If the boomers want to live in South Florida, they are likely to find their choices limited - there are few undeveloped blocks left for new single-family developments.

The Everglades are a boundary on one side, the Atlantic on the other side.

One indication of the diminishing amount of space for development: 58 percent of sales are now condos, compared with 42 percent for single-family houses, says Mr. Shuffield.

Even downtown Miami is rapidly getting built out.

As a result, developers are spreading to other areas such as North Bay Village, an enclave built on landfill in the middle of Biscayne Bay.

One of those buildings is the Lexi, a 19-story development with 164 units.

The Lexi is typical of how the Florida real estate market works.

Developer Scott Greenwald purchased a 1970s-style shopping center, and even before the bulldozers had leveled the property, Kirschner Realty International, one of the area's leading marketing organizations, opened up a sales office.

Giant photos showed the view looking down Biscayne Bay.

The marketing was like candy: Kirschner quickly presold 80 percent of the 164 units, which will be ready for occupancy in the spring of 2007.

As the units sold, the prices rose.

"The pricing started in the low [$300,000], and it's now up to the mid-$500s for a similar unit," says Charles Kirschner.

In fact, Mr. Kirschner says the pricing model for condos is the same as for hotels or airlines.

"As there are fewer units left, it drives the pricing."

Sometimes the price hikes happen in a matter of hours.

Kirschner recently managed the Coral Springs conversion that Bergman waited in line for.

The first people in line received discounts that brought prices below market value.

Through the day, prices rose.

"Otherwise you can't create a frenzied atmosphere," says Kirschner.

How to address soaring demand

The pace may even get faster - if that's possible.

Mark Zilbert, a Miami real estate broker, recently announced plans for "Condo Flip," an Internet-based marketplace where buyers, sellers, brokers, real estate agents, and developers can "flip" condominiums - selling and reselling contracts for them - even before they are built.

"There is a genuine demand that we are about to face and this is a way to address the demand," says Mr. Zilbert, who says he has had inquiries about his plan from all over the world.

The demand he refers to is the expected flood of sellers once some of the projects get their certificates of occupancy.

"I estimate 80 percent of the buyers of these units have an interest in reselling," he says, "but I'm not sure we have the capability to resell such a large number."

"But we can if we expand the buyer base to include someone in France who doesn't know a condo is for sale in Miami, or a buyer from New York who is looking for a retirement place."

All these plans remind some of the other real estate booms in South Florida.

In the 1920s, slick-talking salesmen sold 25,000 lots to tourists until the Depression deflated the land rush.

Again in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s, Florida underwent booms and busts.

"If there is a cycle recently, it seems to be every ten years," says Mr. Cannon.

"We're in the 13th year of a 10-year cycle."

Ethan Harris, chief economist at Lehman Brothers, says almost anything can cause a real estate bubble to burst.

He recalls a Dutch real estate mania that fizzled after a television station aired a story about the boom.

Now the CBS news program "60 Minutes" is working on a Miami condo-craze story.

Although he, too, is worried about the future of the real estate market, Bergman's most pressing concern is another condo conversion that will happen soon in Delray Beach.

He and Ms. Bolber will be there.

"There's no shade anywhere," he says.

"We'll be going through the water and Gatorade."

[Livyjr]

Ah, life in George W. Bush's version of America!

If you are a corporate con-man of some sort, or a scientist who wants to get big bucks for telling lies, or an engineer who will look the other way for a certain sum in your pocket, or bank account, I suppose you just have to love it here!

As for everybody else .....

"Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High"

By MARTHA MENDOZA, AP National Writer

Sat Jul 9, 6:32 PM ET

Allegations of misconduct by U.S. researchers reached record highs last year as the Department of Health and Human Services received 274 complaints — 50 percent higher than 2003 and the most since 1989 when the federal government established a program to deal with scientific misconduct.

Chris Pascal, director of the federal Office of Research Integrity, said its 28 staffers and $7 million annual budget haven't kept pace with the allegations.

The result: Only 23 cases were closed last year.

Of those, eight individuals were found guilty of research misconduct.

In the past 15 years, the office has confirmed about 185 cases of scientific misconduct.

Research suggests this is but a small fraction of all the incidents of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism.

In a survey published June 9 in the journal Nature, about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded admitted to falsification or plagiarism. (One in three admitted to some type of professional misbehavior.)

On the night of his 12th wedding anniversary, Dr. Andrew Friedman was terrified.

This brilliant surgeon and researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School feared that he was about to lose everything — his career, his family, the life he'd built — because his boss was coming closer and closer to the truth:

For the past three years, Friedman had been faking — actually making up — data in some of the respected, peer-reviewed studies he had published in top medical journals.

"It is difficult for me to describe the degree of panic and irrational thought that I was going through," he would later tell an inquiry panel at Harvard.

On this night, March 13, 1995, he had been ordered in writing by his department chair to clear up what appeared to be suspicious data.

But Friedman didn't clear things up.

"I did something which was the worst possible thing I could have done," he testified.

He went to the medical record room, and for the next three or four hours he pulled out permanent medical files of a handful of patients.

Then, covered up his lies, scribbling in the information he needed to support his study.

"I created data."

"I made it up."

"I also made up patients that were fictitious," he testified.

Friedman's wife met him at the door when he came home that night.

He wept uncontrollably.

The next morning he had an emergency appointment with his psychiatrist.

But he didn't tell the therapist the truth, and his lies continued for 10 more days, during which time he delivered a letter, and copies of the doctored files, to his boss.

Eventually he broke down, admitting first to his wife and psychiatrist, and later to his colleagues and managers, what he had been doing.

Friedman formally confessed, retracted his articles, apologized to colleagues and was punished.

Today he has resurrected his career, as senior director of clinical research at Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company.

He refused to speak with the Associated Press.

But his case, recorded in a seven-foot-high stack of documents at the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, tells a story of one man's struggle with power, lies and the crushing pressure of academia.

Some other cases have made headlines:

_On July 18, Eric Poehlman, once a prominent nutrition researcher, will be sentenced in federal court in Vermont for fabricating research data to obtain a $542,000 federal grant while working as a professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.

He faces up to five years in prison.

Poehlman, 49, made up research between 1992 and 2000 on issues like menopause, aging and hormone supplements to win millions of dollars in grant money from the federal government.

He is the first researcher to be permanently barred from ever receiving federal research grants again.

In 2001, while he was being investigated, Poehlman left the medical school and was awarded a $1 million chair in nutrition and metabolism at the University of Montreal, where officials say they were unaware of his problems.

He resigned in January when his contract expired.

_In March, Dr. Gary Kammer, a Wake Forest University rheumatology professor and leading lupus expert, was found to have made up two families and their medical conditions in grant applications to the National Institutes of Health.

He has resigned from the university and has been suspended from receiving federal grants for three years.

_In November, 2004, federal officials found that Dr. Ali Sultan, an award-winning malaria researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, had plagiarized text and figures, and falsified his data — substituting results from one type of malaria for another — on a grant application for federal funds to study malaria drugs.

When brought before an inquiry committee, Sultan tried to pin the blame on a postdoctoral student.

Sultan resigned and is now a faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, according to a spokeswoman there.

While the cases are high-profile, scientists have been cheating for decades.

In 1974, Dr. William Summerlin, a top-ranking Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute researcher, used a marker to make black patches of fur on white mice in an attempt to prove his new skin graft technique was working.

His case prompted Al Gore, then a young Democratic congressman from Tennessee, to hold the first congressional hearings on the issue.

"At the base of our involvement in research lies the trust of American people and the integrity of the scientific exercise," said Gore at the time.

As a result of their hearings, Congress passed a law in 1985 requiring institutions that receive federal money for scientific research to have some system to report rulebreakers.

"Often we're confronted with people who are brilliant, absolutely incredible researchers, but that's not what makes them great scientists."

"It's the character," said Debbi Gilad, a research compliance and integrity officer at the University of California, Davis, which has taken a lead on handling scientific misconduct.

David Wright, a Michigan State University professor who has researched why scientists cheat, said there are four basic reasons: some sort of mental disorder; foreign nationals who learned somewhat different scientific standards; inadequate mentoring; and, most commonly, tremendous and increasing professional pressure to publish studies.

His inability to handle that pressure, Friedman testified, was his downfall.

"And it was almost as though you're on a treadmill that starts out slowly and gradually increases in speed."

"And it happens so gradually you don't realize that eventually you're just hoping you don't fall off," he told a magistrate during a state hearing in 1995.

"You're sprinting near the end and taking it all you can not to fall off."

At the time he started cheating, Friedman was in his late 30s, married and a father of two young children.

Following the path of his father, grandfather and uncle who were all doctors and medical researchers, he was an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and chief of the department of reproductive endocrinology at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

His reputation was tremendous and his work groundbreaking.

His 30-page resume highlighted numerous awards and honors, lectures in Canada, Europe and Australia, and more than 150 articles, book chapters, reviews and abstracts.

Of those, 58 were original research articles, where he had designed studies, conducted clinical trials, enrolled patients, collected and analyzed data and made conclusions.

In the end, investigators found — and Friedman confessed — to making up information for three separate journal articles (one of them never published) involving hormonal treatment of gynecological conditions.

He testified that he was working 80 to 90 hours a week, seeing patients two days a week, doing surgery one day a week, supervising medical residents, serving on as many as 10 different committees at the hospital and the medical school and putting on national medical conferences.

He did seek help, both from a psychiatrist, who counseled him to cut back, and from his boss, who demanded Friedman increase his research and refused to reduce Friedman's patient load.

As good as Friedman was as a doctor, surgeon and researcher, he was actually a lousy cheater.

One thing that brought about his demise, in fact, was that the initials he used for fictitious patients were the same as those of residents and faculty members in his program.

Unlike many scientists who file immediate lawsuits when they're caught, Friedman was repentant, resigning from his positions at both Brigham and Women's, and Harvard.

In 1996, Friedman agreed to be excluded for three years from working on federally funded research.

During the next three years he consulted with drug companies, he paid a $10,000 fine to the state of Massachusetts and surrendered his medical license for a year, became very active with the American Red Cross, donating more than 500 hours, and attended several lectures on ethics and record-keeping.

"Andy can never undo the damage that his actions have caused."

"However, he has paid the price — his academic career is ruined, his reputation sullied, and his personal shame unremitting," wrote Dr. Charles Lockwood, then chair of obstetrics and gynecology at New York University School of Medicine, in a letter on Friedman's behalf.

In 1999, after successfully petitioning to get his license reinstated, he went to work as director of women's health care at Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceuticals.

The job, which he still has, involves designing and reviewing clinical trials for hormonal birth control, writing package insert labels and lecturing to doctors.

Lately he's appeared on television and in newspaper articles responding to concerns about the safety of the birth control patch.

Mary Anne Wyatt, a retired biochemist in Natick, Mass., is one of several former patients.

"I think it's not at all surprising that a drug company would hire somebody who is very comfortable with hiding the effects of very dangerous drugs," said Wyatt, who unsuccessfully sued him.

Ortho-McNeil spokeswoman Bonnie Jacobs said the company was well aware of Friedman's history when it hired him.

"He is an excellent doctor, an asset to our company," she said.

[Livyjr]

"Dennis Strengthens, Heads for Gulf Coast"

By DAVID ROYSE, Associated Press Writer

15 minutes ago

FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. - Hurricane Dennis closed in on the Gulf Coast on Sunday after strengthening into a dangerous Category 4 storm, plowing toward a region still recovering from a hurricane 10 months ago.

Rain blew sideways and wind exceeded 45 mph in some spots as the storm closed in on the Gulf Coast, sending rolling waves smashing over piers and onto the coast.

Landfall was expected late Sunday afternoon somewhere along the coast of the Florida Panhandle, Alabama or Mississippi, where nearly 1.4 million people were under evacuation orders and some towns were left almost deserted.

After weakening to a Category 1 storm over Cuba, Dennis strengthened in the Gulf on Saturday and became a Category 4 storm again early Sunday, with top sustained winds of 145 mph.

"Category 4 is not just a little bit worse — it's much worse," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

"Damage increases exponentially as the wind speed increases."

"And no matter where it makes actual landfall, it's going to have a tremendous impact well away from the center."

Dennis' would be the earliest Category 4 hurricane to hit the United States since Hurricane Audrey struck the Louisiana and Texas coasts in June 1957, according to the hurricane center.

The center has no record of a Category 4 storm ever hitting Florida's Panhandle or Alabama.

Hurricane-force winds stretched out up to 40 miles from Dennis' center, and they could go as far as 175 miles inland, forecasters said.

A data buoy about 50 miles offshore recorded a 33-foot high wave in the Gulf.

The worst weather from hurricanes is typically on the front right side of the storm, in this case to the east of where it hits.

That puts places like Mobile, Ala., Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach firmly in the crosshairs.

Blamed for at least 20 deaths in Haiti and Cuba, Dennis carried a threat of more than a foot of rain plus waves on top of storm surge up to 15 feet in the same area that was pummeled by Hurricane Ivan last September.

Some buildings still had scaffolding around them as repairs went on.

Piles of debris from Ivan lay in streets, ready to be launched into the air by fierce winds.

"I think there is a legitimate feeling, 'Why me? What did I do wrong?'" Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said.

Before entering the Gulf, Dennis swung around the Florida Keys and dealt a glancing blow, flooding streets and knocking out power.

As night fell Saturday and the first bands of rain started hitting Fort Walton Beach, nearly every business was closed.

One exception was Joe and Eddie's, a diner providing short breaks for sheriff's deputies working 12-hour shifts.

"It's the only place around that's open," deputy Jim Welch said.

About 700,000 people were under evacuation orders in Florida, as were 500,000 in Alabama and 190,000 in Mississippi.

Shelters were open and traffic doubled on some highways as people fled inland.

Alabama officials turned Interstate 65 into a one-way route north from the coast to Montgomery.

In Pensacola, a 70-year-old man at a special needs shelters died, but it appeared to be due to natural causes, Escambia County sheriff's investigator Terry Kilgore said.

Police went through waterfront neighborhoods in coastal Panhandle cities advising residents of the mandatory evacuation orders.

In Fort Walton Beach, they didn't have any problem convincing Pat Gosney, who remained in his house across the street from an offshoot of Choctawhatchee Bay during Hurricane Ivan last year.

"That's why we're leaving," Gosney said.

"We'll never stay again."

At 9 a.m. EDT, Dennis' eye was about 125 miles south-southeast of Pensacola in the Panhandle and 175 miles southeast of Pascagoula, Miss.

It was moving north at about 16 mph and expected to turn more to the northwest before landfall, forecasters said.

In the southern tip of Florida early Sunday, power was back to more than three-quarters of the 428,000 homes and businesses who had outages when Dennis' eye passed 125 miles to the west of Key West a day earlier.

Exposed at the tip of Florida's Peninsula, Key West last endured a direct hit from a hurricane in 1948.

"We were lucky, no doubt about it," said Jim Hendrick as he picked up branches in front of his house.

For Gulf Coast residents, the approaching hurricane was all too familiar.

"I have my moments of bitterness, but I'm OK," said Andrea Walter of Gulf Breeze, whose house was seriously damaged by Ivan.

"You can't get too discouraged or you'll go crazy."
___

Associated Press writers Coralie Carlson in Key West, Bill Kaczor in Pensacola, Mark Long in Panama City, Bob Johnson in Gulf Shores, Ala., Brett Martel in New Orleans and Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Miss., contributed to this report.

[Livyjr]

"Dennis Strengthens, Heads for Gulf Coast"

By DAVID ROYSE, Associated Press Writer

FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. - Hurricane Dennis closed in on the Gulf Coast on Sunday after strengthening into a dangerous Category 4 storm, plowing toward a region still recovering from a hurricane 10 months ago.

"I think there is a legitimate feeling, 'Why me? What did I do wrong?'" Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said.

"I think there is a legitimate feeling, 'Why me? What did I do wrong?'" Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said.

Maybe, Jebbie, it's just a whole lot of Bush-family bad karma coming back to bite you and yours right hard on the ***!

There's where my money is going anyway, if I were to be a betting man!

Or who knows, maybe it's just the luck of the draw, and you lost!

"Iraq warns neighbours of terror threat"

Sun Jul 10, 6:47 AM ET

KUWAIT CITY (AFP) - Iraq warned that the cycle of terror and violence raging in the war-torn nation could spread to its neighbours as a result of ongoing military campaigns against insurgency.

"Military pressure on terror organisations in Iraq will force it to export its operations across the border and certainly neighbouring states are the nearest for the spread of these terrorists," Iraqi government spokesman Leith Kubba told Kuwaiti daily Al-Qabas.

"All of us are within the danger circle and all countries should support Iraq to help it get out of this terror swamp which constitutes a danger to all," Kubba said Sunday.

The Iraqi official said "terrorists" are infiltrating from Arab neighbours Syria and Saudi Arabia.

"You should ask Syria and Saudi Arabia from where terrorists come ... You should ask them for the reasons of the infiltration through their borders ... so the Iraqi nightmare comes to an end," Kubba said.

"Unfortunately Iraq has become a big school for terror after leading terrorists have moved from Afghanistan into Iraq."

Iraqi officials have repeatedly warned that the return of thousands of Al Qaeda-linked operatives to their home countries after the end of insurgency will lead to terror attacks in those countries.

Saudi Arabia's Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz said Saturday he expected militants who will return from fighting in Iraq to be worse than Afghan war returnees, who have been largely blamed for violence in the country.

Scores of Saudis are believed to be among foreign combatants who have infiltrated Iraq to fight US-led forces and the US-backed Iraqi government.

end quotes

Back in the Viet Nam times, here in OUR America, when George W. Bush was working harder than he ever worked before to keep himself from having to go to Viet Nam, as was his mentor and present-day handler Dick Cheney, there was a song with words in it to the effect of "Try to set the world on fire!"

Well, I think that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have lived their dream as it is expressed in the words to that song!

They might actually have succeeded in doing that, after all these years of getting themselves ready for the occasion!

They might actually have done it, set the world on fire, that is, and now, I wonder what they will do for their encore?

Fiddle, while the world burns?

Hmmmmmm ......

[Livyjr]

"Flood victims cope on holiday - Officials still trying to assess extent of damage from dam break and determine its cause" 
 
By JORDAN CARLEO-EVANGELIST, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Tuesday, July 5, 2005

FORT ANN -- For a woman who'd spent most of the last 48 hours unsure whether her summer home near Hadlock Pond had been smashed to pieces, to say Lisa Oriol was relieved to be able to fire up her grill with her family on the Fourth of July is an understatement.

The deluge unleashed when the brand-new Hadlock Pond dam crumbled Saturday surged toward her one-story home a quarter-mile southwest of what was Hadlock Pond, leaving a menacing, silty footprint just feet from Oriol's back door.

Town and state engineers also continued to investigate what caused the concrete and earth dam, which had just been completed in May, to give way and dump most of the 220-acre man-made lake on unsuspecting downstream residents.

Answers remained elusive.

"State dam safety program under scrutiny after break - Watchdogs and engineers question sufficiency of DEC agency's funding, staffing"

By MATT PACENZA, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Sunday, July 10, 2005

FORT ANN -- Raphael Colb watched Saturday night as the trickling stream that winds through his 35 acres became a shrieking river within 10 feet of his home.

After a newly built dam on Hadlock Pond burst that gorgeous summer evening, up to 1 billion gallons of water tore through his neighborhood.

"We have pieces of boats hanging from trees 30 feet up in the middle of the woods," Colb said.

"It changed the landscape completely."

"Thank God no one was hurt."

"Thank God I still have my home."

One week after the Hadlock dam ruptured, sparing lives but destroying four homes and damaging a dozen others, engineers and state officials are trying to figure out what happened.

Interviews with dam experts and Hadlock Pond residents suggest the problem was a design flaw or construction problem in the face of the 450-foot-long, 35-foot-high earth embankment dam.

A weak spot became a fissure that sprung a leak and carved a hole, ultimately tearing a 65-foot-wide chasm in the face of the dam.

The origin of that problem may not be known for weeks or even months.

But watchdog groups and available data raise serious questions about insufficient resources at the dam safety unit of the Department of Environmental Conservation, the state agency charged with making sure thousands of dams in New York remain safe.

By the numbers, New York does not have a robust dam safety program, according to a 2004 state-by-state comparison by the Association of Dam Safety Officials.

The DEC has five full-time members in its dam safety unit.

They are charged with keeping an eye on 5,021 dams statewide, a ratio of 947 dams for every employee.

The national average is 260 dams for every dam safety employee.

New York ranks 43rd out of 50 states by that measure.

It also spends less on dam safety than other states do.

The total budget of $746,000 works out to $149 for every dam in the state.

The national average is $318.

Those numbers provide a rough indicator of the quality of a state's program, said Meg Galloway, a safety engineer with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

"A well-funded, well-staffed dam safety program will be a safer program," said Galloway, president of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.

Fragality beneath facades

A dam break conjures images of an old, crumbling structure.

In fact, new dams fail frequently.

Precise numbers aren't available, but construction or design flaws are among four principal causes of dam collapses, experts say, along with catastrophic weather, a structure's age and operator error, as when someone fails to open a spillway.

One of the most famous dam collapses in U.S. history happened when the new Teton Dam in Idaho failed just as its reservoir was being filled.

The 1976 incident killed 14 people and caused nearly $1 billion in damage.

"If there are weak links from design, construction, whatever, they often raise their heads early," said Marty McCann, director of the National Performance of Dams Program at Stanford University, which collects data on dam failures.

His data show dams are more likely to fail in the first five years than at any other point in their life span.

A dam was first built to create Hadlock Pond in 1897.

In 1978, the Army Corps of Engineers found the dam's spillway wasn't large enough to handle a major rainstorm.

Residents raised money to rebuild part of the dam and repair some of its features.

Over time, the area become more developed.

Today, more than 200 year-round and seasonal homes dot the shores.

In the mid-1990s, the DEC told residents and officials the agency had again determined the dam posed a safety problem in the event of a massive rainstorm.

In 2003, the town of Fort Ann entered into an agreement with the DEC to build a new dam.

The town hired a New Hampshire-based engineering firm, HTE Northeast Inc., to design the dam.

It was built by Kubricky Construction Corp. of Queensbury, a division of DA Collins, a Glens Falls construction and environmental services firm that built the Twin Bridges on the Northway.

Work on the new structure began in September, after contractors slowly drained the lake and tore down the old dam.

The job was halted during the winter's coldest months and was completed in May.

The pond then slowly filled with rainwater until it reached capacity about three weeks before the collapse.

Representatives of HTE and DA Collins did not return phone calls seeking comment on their work at Hadlock Pond.

Fort Ann officials also did not respond to inquiries about the process by which those companies received the contracts to build and design the dam.

Anatomy of a break

One thing is sure: The collapse of the dam was not caused by the weather.

The day it broke, the sun was out.

Just 0.54 inches of rain fell the day before, according to the nearby National Weather Service station in Glens Falls.

Lakeside residents say the water was not rising in the days before the rupture, as it sometimes did after periods of heavy rain.

Dams are designed to handle catastrophic storms.

The first safety valve is the dam's spillway, a chute typically made of concrete at a lake's lip that drains off excess water.

Some dams have more than one.

When heavy rains fall and hillside streams pour into a lake, raising water levels, the volume of water pouring through the spillway will increase.

If the spillway maxes out and water levels keep rising, some dams have another safety feature, called fuse plugs.

Fuse plugs are a type of secondary spillway, points in the dam that are designed to fail in a controlled fashion to release rising water if the spillway can't handle it all.

The Hadlock Pond dam had two 50-foot, earthen fuse plugs, which town officials have said opened during the dam's collapse.

Fuse plug failures have been the cause of other new dam collapses, most notably in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where a renovated dam on the Silver Lake Basin burst in May 2003, destroying 20 homes and doing more than $100 million in damage.

In the days before that collapse, upper Michigan had been hit by heavy rains.

The lack of similar high waters in Fort Ann is why Bob Pettersen -- president of the Lake Hadlock Association, which has about 130 homeowner members -- doubts the fuse plugs caused the dam's collapse.

The plugs were above the pond's water level, so they wouldn't have been under pressure before the break.

"We didn't even have water pouring out of the spillway," Pettersen said.

"Every time I hear that it was the fuse plugs, that makes no sense to me."

This suggests the dam probably failed at some point below the water level, below the spillway, on the structure's earthen face.

One likely scenario is that once the dam was filled, the pressure of hundreds of millions of gallons found a weak point.

Water would have begun to seep and spread throughout the dam -- a process called piping -- creating a fissure that expanded.

"When the flow of water is sufficient to begin moving material, all of a sudden you'll have a hole in the embankment," McCann said.

"As that continues, the embankment will begin to collapse."

"It's a very, very common problem in the context of dams that have failed."

Anecdotal evidence suggests the dam was leaking the morning of the collapse, which would support the piping hypothesis.

"My wife came to me Saturday morning and said, 'They're drawing the water down,' " recalled Terry Potter, a lakeside resident and treasurer of the lake association.

"She said the line on our dock was down a little bit from normal."

The DEC has brought in an outside consultant to aid in its probe.

Investigators will examine the parts of the dam that remain and those that washed downstream, some miles away.

They'll also review the project's design and construction documents.

"In a fairly large construction project, everything is fair game," said Galloway.

DEC officials have said they're looking into the possibility the collapse may be linked to a minor geological fault in the area.

Pettersen doubts that explanation -- a purportedly flawed dam had survived on that fault for more than 100 years, after all.

"When you have a problem, you ask yourself 'What changed?' " he said.

"What changed was we had a new dam."

Dam safety program faulted

Sharp criticism of the DEC comes from the watchdog group Environmental Advocates of New York, which is amid a study of the agency's dam safety program.

The agency doesn't do enough inspections, said Rob Moore, the group's executive director.

"They are unable to get around to the vast majority of the dams in the state that are regulated."

The group says the DEC has inspected only an average of 250 dams a year between 2002 and 2004, based upon documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request.

That means just 15 percent of all dams statewide have even been looked at in the past three years.

DEC could not confirm that figure.

Its records show an average of 415 dam inspections per year over the past five years.

But some of those dams -- like Hadlock Pond -- were looked at more than once, explaining the discrepancy between the numbers.

State inspections are important not only to spot problems in existing dams but to review projects before and during construction, Galloway said.

"They may notice materials that aren't up to spec," she said.

"They're a pair of new eyes and may see something that the person who is there day to day isn't noticing because it has become so routine."

A DEC staff member visited Hadlock Pond four times during construction, according to the agency.

The last trip was in April.

The agency did not visit the site after the dam was completed.

State legislators have pushed the DEC about whether it has enough employees to handle all of the agency's responsibilities.

"When you look at the staffing levels, they're obviously significantly down," said Tom DiNapoli, D-Long Island, chairman of the Assembly's Environmental Conservation Committee.

According to Environmental Advocates, DEC has approximately 700 fewer full-time employees today than it did in the early 1990s, when it had slightly more than 4,000.

Over that same period, the number of staff in the dam safety unit has dropped from seven to five, according to the DEC.

Every state agency has taken a hit during difficult budget times, DiNapoli pointed out.

But he does not believe DEC leaders, whom he questions during budget hearings, are willing to acknowledge that some of their work -- like dam safety oversight -- has suffered.

"Hopefully something like a dam collapse will get them to pay attention to some areas where they have staffing needs," DiNapoli said.

Locals are most interested in the question of who will help them now.

Who will repair their roads, clean up their land, replace or fix their homes and rebuild their dam?

Nearly all eyes are on the state, especially the DEC.

Residents hope the state steps up to make good for those who lost so much.

"New York state was mandating the dam be rebuilt."

"New York state was overseeing the dam's construction," Pettersen said.

"Now New York state needs to come in and help these people."

Matt Pacenza can be reached at 454-5533 or by e-mail at mpacenza@timesunion.com.

[Livyjr]

And here is some "breaking news" that, if true, probably wouldn't surprise a single soul on the face of the earth:

Just released 15 minutes ago on Editor & Publisher website!

"MSNBC Analyst Says Cooper Documents Reveal Karl Rove as Source in Plame Case"

By E&P Staff

Published: July 01, 2005 11:30 PM ET

NEW YORK - Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her.

Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

Link here: http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp...

"Rove's lawyer acknowledges he was Time reporter's source"

Sun Jul 10, 4:36 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Top White House aide Karl Rove discussed a former US ambassador and his CIA agent wife with a Time magazine reporter, according to a report.

The Newsweek weekly quoted Rove lawyer Robert Luskin as confirming that Rove was the source who gave information to Time reporter Matt Cooper under a pledge of confidentiality, and last week released him to testify about that conversation to a grand jury.

Cooper had been ordered by a US federal judge to testify before the grand jury investigating whether the agent's identity was illegally leaked.

Rove, President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff, has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson or his wife, Valerie Plame.

And Luskin told Newsweek last week that his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."

Plame's name was first published in a column by veteran reporter Robert Novak in 2003, which cited senior administration officials.

Wilson claimed she was outed as punishment for his contradiction of Bush's assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Africa.

Miller researched the story, but didn't write it, and Cooper only mentioned it in passing.

[Livyjr]

Uh, what about this, then Pervez?

"Rape victim takes case to Pakistan's Supreme Court"

By Zeeshan Haider
Mon Jun 27, 6:14 AM ET

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani woman gang raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council said on Monday she hoped the country's Supreme Court would reimpose death sentences on the men who attacked her.

President Pervez Musharraf, who has been trying to project Pakistan as a moderate and progressive Muslim nation, has taken a personal interest Mai's case, saying it was tarnishing the country's image overseas.

"Salman Rushdie calls for end to 'culture' of rape in India, Pakistan"

Sun Jul 10, 4:01 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - British novelist Salman Rushdie said both India and Pakistan need to overcome a "culture" of rape that oppresses women.

"The 'culture' of rape that exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of honor and shame," Rushdie wrote in an opinion column published Sunday in the New York Times.

"Thanks to that code's ruthlessness, raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods and walking into rivers to drown themselves."

"It will take generations to change that."

"Meanwhile, the law must do what it can."

Women in Pakistan are often subjected to brutal crimes such as murder, rape and being burnt with acid.

In June, Pakistan was criticised by the United States for its handling of another gangrape victim Mukhtaran Mai who was barred from leaving the country to speak to human rights groups.

Pakistan's Supreme Court last week ordered the rearrest of 13 men linked to her case and suspended their acquittals by lower courts.

Rushdie also criticized India, saying the legal system should not recognize decisions by Muslim legal experts such as those from the powerful Islamist seminary Darul-Uloom that deny women their rights.

"At the risk of being called a communalist, I must agree that any country that claims to be a modern, secular democracy must secularize and unify its legal system, and take power over women's lives away, once and for all, from medievalist institutions like Darul-Uloom," Rushdie wrote.

[jeffmoskin]

"Rove's lawyer acknowledges he was Time reporter's source"

Sun Jul 10, 4:36 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Top White House aide Karl Rove discussed a former US ambassador and his CIA agent wife with a Time magazine reporter, according to a report.

The Newsweek weekly quoted Rove lawyer Robert Luskin as confirming that Rove was the source who gave information to Time reporter Matt Cooper under a pledge of confidentiality, and last week released him to testify about that conversation to a grand jury.

Cooper had been ordered by a US federal judge to testify before the grand jury investigating whether the agent's identity was illegally leaked.

Rove, President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff, has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson or his wife, Valerie Plame.

And Luskin told Newsweek last week that his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."

Plame's name was first published in a column by veteran reporter Robert Novak in 2003, which cited senior administration officials.

Wilson claimed she was outed as punishment for his contradiction of Bush's assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Africa.

Miller researched the story, but didn't write it, and Cooper only mentioned it in passing.

He'll never serve a day. Judith Miller is doing Rove's time

[Livyjr]

He'll never serve a day.

Judith Miller is doing Rove's time!

I believing that you are right, jeffmoskin ....

And the BULL **** spinning begins!

"Rove told reporter about Plame’s role at CIA - But Bush aide didn’t identify covert agent by name, attorney says"

By Josh White

Updated: 5:21 a.m. ET July 11, 2005

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.

Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials.

Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.

Outing a federal case

The leak of Plame's name to the news media spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking to find the origin of the disclosure.

Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her confidential sources.

To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity.

Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak's column was published.

In the conversation, Rove gave Cooper a "big warning" that Wilson's assertions might not be entirely accurate and that it was not the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip.

Rove apparently told Cooper that it was "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip," according to a story in Newsweek's July 18 issue.

White House link to leak?

Rove's conversation with Cooper could be significant because it indicates a White House official was discussing Plame prior to her being publicly named and could lead to evidence of how Novak learned her name.

Although the information is revelatory, it is still unknown whether Rove is a focus of the investigation.

Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, has said that Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has told him that Rove is not a target of the probe.

Luskin said yesterday that Rove did not know Plame's name and was not actively trying to push the information into the public realm.

Instead, Luskin said, Rove discussed the matter — under the cloak of secrecy — with Cooper at the tail end of a conversation about a different issue.

Cooper had called Rove to discuss other matters on a Friday before deadline, and the topic of Wilson came up briefly.

Luskin said Cooper raised the question.

"Rove did not mention her name to Cooper," Luskin said.

"This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity."

"What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren't true."

‘Nothing to hide’

In particular, Rove was urging caution because then-CIA Director George J. Tenet was about to issue a statement regarding Iraq's alleged interest in African uranium and its inaccurate inclusion in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

Tenet took the blame for allowing a misleading paragraph into the speech, but Tenet also said that the president, vice president and other senior officials were never briefed on Wilson's report.

After the investigation into the leak began, Luskin said, Rove signed a waiver in December 2003 or January 2004 authorizing prosecutors to speak to any reporters Rove had previously engaged in discussion, which included Cooper.

"His written waiver included the world," Luskin said.

"It was intended to be a global waiver. . . ."

"He wants to make sure that the special prosecutor has everyone's evidence."

"That reflects someone who has nothing to hide."

Cooper had indicated he would go to jail rather than expose a confidential source, but he agreed last week to cooperate with the grand jury after getting clearance from his source to testify.

Luskin said Cooper had been clear to testify all along — because of the waiver signed 18 months ago — but that the waiver was "reaffirmed" on Wednesday, the day of a hearing to decide whether he and Miller would go to jail.

[Livyjr]

I believing that you are right, jeffmoskin ....

And the BULL **** spinning begins!

"Rove told reporter about Plame’s role at CIA - But Bush aide didn’t identify covert agent by name, attorney says"

By Josh White

Updated: 5:21 a.m. ET July 11, 2005

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.

Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials.

Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.

And speaking of BULL **** spinning, here comes Scottie McClellan now, to lay another dose, right on US ....

"White House Won't Comment on Rove, Leak"

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 2 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - For the better part of two years, the word coming out of the Bush White House was that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a female CIA officer's identity and that whoever did would be fired.

But Bush spokesman Scott McClellan wouldn't repeat those claims Monday in the face of Rove's own lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledging the political operative spoke to Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, one of the reporters who disclosed Valerie Plame's name.

McLellan repeatedly said he couldn't comment because the matter is under investigation.

When it was pointed out he had commented previously even though the investigation was ongoing, he responded: "I've really said all I'm going to say on it."

Democrats jumped on the issue, calling for the administration to fire Rove, or at least to yank his security clearance.

One Democrat pushed for Republicans to hold a congressional hearing in which Rove would testify.

"The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

"I trust they will follow through on this pledge."

"If these allegations are true, this rises above politics and is about our national security."

The investigation into the 2003 leak had largely faded into the background until last week, when New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail rather than reveal who in the administration talked to her about Plame.

Cooper also had planned to go to jail rather than reveal his source but at the last minute agreed to cooperate with investigators when a source, Rove, gave him permission to do so.

Cooper's employer, Time Inc., also turned over Cooper's e-mail and notes.

One of the e-mails was a note from Cooper to his boss in which he said he had spoken to Rove, who described the wife of former U.S. Ambassador and Bush administration critic Joe Wilson as someone who "apparently works" at the CIA, Newsweek magazine reported.

Within days of the July 11, 2003, e-mail, Cooper's byline was on a Time article identifying Wilson's wife by name — Valerie Plame.

Her identity was first disclosed by columnist Robert Novak.

The e-mail did not say Rove had disclosed the name, but it made clear that Rove had discussed the issue.

That ran counter to what McClellan has been saying.

For example, in September and October 2003, McClellan's comments about Rove included the following: "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion," and, "It's not true."

Reporters seized on the subject Monday, pressing McClellan to either repeat the denials or explain why he can't now.

"I have said for quite some time that this is an ongoing investigation and we're not going to get into discussing it," McClellan replied.

Asked whether Rove committed a crime, McClellan said, "This is a question relating to an ongoing investigation."

Rove declined to comment Monday and referred questions to his attorney.

Last year, he said, "I didn't know her name and didn't leak her name."

The Rove disclosure was an embarrassment for a White House that prides itself on not leaking to reporters and has insisted that Rove was not involved in exposing Plame's identity.

The disclosure also left in doubt whether Bush would carry out his promise to fire anyone found to have leaked the CIA operative's identity.

Rove is one of the president's closest confidants — the man Bush has described as the architect of his re-election, and currently deputy White House chief of staff.

Rove's conversation with Cooper took place five days after Plame's husband suggested in a New York Times op-ed piece that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Wilson has since suggested his wife's name was leaked as retaliation.

The e-mail that Cooper wrote to his bureau chief said Wilson's wife authorized a trip by Wilson to Africa.

The purpose was to check out reports that Iraq had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium for use in nuclear weapons.

Wilson's subsequent public criticism of the administration was based on his findings during the trip that cast serious doubt on the allegation that Iraq had tried to obtain the material.

Luskin, Rove's lawyer, said his client did not disclose Plame's name.

Luskin declined to say how Rove found out that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and refused to say how Rove came across the information that it was Wilson's wife who authorized his trip to Africa.

Rove's lawyer says his client has done nothing wrong.

"In the conversation, Karl is warning Cooper not to get too far out in front of the story," Luskin said.

"There were false allegations out there that Vice President Cheney sent Wilson to Niger and that Wilson had reported back to Cheney about his trip to Niger."

"Neither was true."

"A fair-minded reading of Cooper's e-mail is that Rove was trying to discourage Time magazine from circulating false allegations about Cheney, not trying to encourage them by saying anything about Wilson or his wife."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and a private group, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, called on Bush to suspend Roves security clearances, shutting him out of classified meetings.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., asked the Republican chairman of the House Government Reform Committee to hold a hearing where Rove would testify.

Rove should resign or the president should fire him, said Tom Matzzie, Washington director of the liberal advocacy group, MoveOn PAC.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., asked Rove to detail any conversations he had about Plame before her name surfaced publicly in Novak's column.
___

On the Net:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

[Livyjr]

"Popular Parkinson's drug linked to gambling - Compulsive behaviors may be side effect of Mirapex, research suggests"

The Similarities of Problem Gamblers and Substance Abusers

There is fresh evidence that problem gamblers have personality profiles similar to substance abusers.

Updated: 4:00 p.m. ET July 11, 2005

CHICAGO - Joe Neglia was a retired government intelligence worker with Parkinson’s disease when he suddenly developed what he calls a gambling habit from hell.

After losing thousands of dollars playing slot machines near his California home several times a day for nearly two years, Neglia stumbled across an Internet report linking a popular Parkinson’s drug he used with compulsive gambling.

“I thought, 'Oh my God, this must be it,”’ he said.

Three days after stopping the drug, Mirapex, “all desire to gamble just went away completely."

"I felt like I had my brain back.”

A Mayo Clinic study published Monday in July’s Archives of Neurology describes 11 other Parkinson’s patients who developed the unusual problem while taking Mirapex or similar drugs between 2002 and 2004.

Doctors have since identified 14 additional Mayo patients with the problem, said lead author Dr. M. Leann Dodd, a Mayo psychiatrist.

“It’s certainly enough for us to be cautious as we are using it,” Dodd said.

“We wouldn’t want them to have some kind of financial ruin or difficulties that could be prevented.”

Compulsive gambling, sex and shopping

Dr. Leo Verhagen, a Parkinson’s specialist at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center who was not involved in the study, says he and some colleagues all have a few patients who developed compulsive gambling while taking Mirapex, a drug that relieves tremors and stiffness.

The behavior usually disappears when the drug dose is lowered, Verhagen said.

He praised the Mayo article for raising awareness for doctors and patients.

Neglia, 54, now living in Millersville, Md., was not treated at Mayo or involved in the study.

He said the problem is underreported “because of the embarrassment factor” and is one of several patients suing manufacturer Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., accusing the company of failing to adequately warn patients about the potential side effects.

California attorney Daniel Kodam, who filed the lawsuit last year, said he’s spoken with more than 200 Mirapex patients who developed compulsive behaviors, including excessive gambling, sex and shopping.

He is seeking to have the complaint certified as a nationwide class-action lawsuit.

A similar suit has been filed in Canada, Kodam said.

Parkinson’s disease is a disorder of the central nervous system that affects more than 1 million Americans.

Neglia said he has contacted the Food and Drug Administration but that the agency has failed to act on numerous adverse reaction reports about Mirapex.

An FDA spokeswoman said the agency is examining the reports to determine if there’s any connection to the drug but declined to say how many it has received.

Katherine King O’Connor, a spokeswoman for the Ridgefield, Conn.-based Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, said there’s no scientific evidence that Mirapex causes the problem.

Still, the company revised Mirapex’s package insert earlier this year to include compulsive behavior among potential side effects after receiving “rare” reports — all after the drug was approved for U.S. use in 1997, O’Connor said.

'Like a light switch being turned off'

Mirapex was among top-selling Parkinson’s drugs last year, with more than $200 million in U.S. sales, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical information and consulting firm.

Mirapex, or pramipexole, reduces tremors and the slow, stiff movements that are a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease.

It belongs to a class of drugs that mimic the effects of dopamine, a brain chemical that controls movement and is deficient in Parkinson’s disease.

Mirapex targets dopamine receptors in a brain region associated with emotions that include pleasure and reward-seeking behavior, Dodd said.

It can also cause extreme sudden sleepiness.

It is sometimes used alone or with the mainstay Parkinson’s drug, levodopa.

Though a few of the Mayo patients took related drugs, Dodd said most used Mirapex.

They included a 68-year-old man who lost more than $200,000 at casinos over six months and a 41-year-old computer programmer who became “consumed” with Internet gambling, losing $5,000 within a few months.

Dodd said Mayo doctors now ask patients using the drugs if they have suddenly taken up gambling.

Affected patients are usually switched to different drugs or doses, and the result is often dramatic, “like a light switch being turned off when they stopped the drug,” she said.

[Livyjr]

And speaking of BULL **** spinning, here comes Scottie McClellan now, to lay another dose, right on US ....

"White House Won't Comment on Rove, Leak"

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - For the better part of two years, the word coming out of the Bush White House was that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a female CIA officer's identity and that whoever did would be fired.

But Bush spokesman Scott McClellan wouldn't repeat those claims Monday in the face of Rove's own lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledging the political operative spoke to Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, one of the reporters who disclosed Valerie Plame's name.

McLellan repeatedly said he couldn't comment because the matter is under investigation.

When it was pointed out he had commented previously even though the investigation was ongoing, he responded: "I've really said all I'm going to say on it."

The e-mail did not say Rove had disclosed the name, but it made clear that Rove had discussed the issue.

That ran counter to what McClellan has been saying.

For example, in September and October 2003, McClellan's comments about Rove included the following: "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion," and, "It's not true."
__

On the Net:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

"Nat'l Guard Misses Recruiting Goal Again"

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer

24 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The Army National Guard, a cornerstone of the U.S. force in Iraq, missed its recruiting goal for at least the ninth straight month in June and is nearly 19,000 soldiers below its authorized strength, military officials said Monday.

The Army Guard was seeking 5,032 new soldiers in June but signed up only 4,337, a 14 percent shortfall, according to statistics released Monday by the Pentagon.

It is more than 10,000 soldiers behind its year-to-date goal of almost 45,000 recruits, and has missed its recruiting target during at least 17 of the last 18 months.

"The recruiting environment remains difficult in terms of economic conditions and alternatives," the Army said in a statement released Monday.

"We are concerned about meeting the fiscal year 2005 recruiting missions, but we are confident that our recruiting initiatives will take hold and the American public will respond."

Jack Harrison, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, said that despite the shortfall, the service is still able to meet its commitments to the Pentagon as well as to state governors, who call on the Guard during disasters and other emergencies.

Some governors have complained about shortages of troops and equipment in their Guard units, prompting the Guard to set a goal of keeping half of each state's Guard forces at home at any given time.

The Pentagon has already significantly reduced its use of all Guard and reserve forces in the last two years.

In April 2003, during the height of the Iraq invasion, some 224,000 of them across all the services were mobilized for all federal missions both at home and overseas; that figure now stands at 138,000, according to Pentagon statistics.

Harrison acknowledged the heavy use of the Guard in missions in Iraq and Afghanistan has affected recruiting efforts, but noted that the service is ahead of its goals in retaining soldiers who have the option to get out.

"We have folks that are coming back from long periods of time in Iraq and Afghanistan who are reenlisting," he said.

Guard troops make up more than one-third of the soldiers in Iraq, numbering six brigades plus a division headquarters.

In the next rotation of troops, to take place over the next two years, the Guard's portion of the total force in Iraq is expected to drop substantially as newly reorganized active-duty Army units come on-line and take up more duties there, officials said.

In total, the Army Guard has about 331,000 soldiers, 94.5 percent of its authorized strength of 350,000, officials said.

Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke said the Army Guard last made its monthly goal in September 2004, when it exceeded its target by 27 recruits.

The last time it made its goal before that was December 2003.

Harrison, however, said the Army Guard had not met its monthly recruiting goal for 20 straight months, since October 2003.

Officials could not immediately explain the discrepancy.

The Army Guard also missed its annual recruiting goals for 2003 and 2004, Krenke said.

The entire Army is suffering from recruiting problems, but the other components of the service — the active-duty force and the Reserve — made their goals for June.

Both, however, remain well behind their annual goals, which they measure from October 2004 to September 2005.

The regular Army has recruited 47,121 soldiers, or 86 percent of its goal of 54,935 for this point in the year.

It is trying to reach 80,000 by the end of September.

Officials are becoming less hopeful they will make it, even though the summer is considered the high season for recruiting, as recent high school graduates look for jobs.

To deal with the problem, the Army has increased the number of recruiters in its ranks, and augmented incentives for those signing up.

"We think these adjustments will begin to take hold in the upcoming months," the Army statement said.

The Army Reserve has recruited 15,540 soldiers, or 79 percent of its goal of 19,753 at this point in the year.

All three components of the Army are ahead on their efforts to retain current soldiers.

Officials credit that to a desire on the part of the troops to finish the mission of making Iraq a stable democracy.

The only other arm of the military that missed its June recruiting goal was the Navy Reserve, which fell 8 percent short and remains the same percentage behind its annual goal of 8,733 recruits.

The active Navy, Air Force and Marines made their monthly goals, and are at or ahead of their year-to-date targets, the Pentagon said.

The Air National Guard, Air Force Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve made their June goals; of those, the Air Force Reserve and Marine Reserve are at or ahead of their year-to-date goals.

The Air National Guard is 17 percent behind its year-to-date goal of 7,619 recruits.

The Air Force and Navy are seeing far less action in Iraq and Afghanistan than their counterparts in the ground combat forces of the Army and Marines, who have suffered most of the casualties.

[jeffmoskin]

"Nat'l Guard Misses Recruiting Goal Again"

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer

24 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The Army National Guard, a cornerstone of the U.S. force in Iraq, missed its recruiting goal for at least the ninth straight month in June and is nearly 19,000 soldiers below its authorized strength, military officials said Monday.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

[Abu Beacon]

He'll never serve a day. Judith Miller is doing Rove's time

Is Judith Miller really not disclosing names because it's against her principles, or is she protecting someone in the administration (probably Rove) for other reasons?

Is there going to be a pay off for her for keeping silent?

Or am I being too cynical?

A.B.